A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

Hagenbach even takes as "the representative of the rationalism of his age." In his juvenile Robbers, indeed, he makes his worst villains freethinkers; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion against all assailants; but hardly ever after that piece does he give a favourable portrait of a priest. [1430] He himself soon joined the Aufklärung; and all his æsthetic appreciation of Christianity never carried him beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency (Anlage) to the highest and noblest, though that was in general tastelessly and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that in a certain sense it is the only æsthetic religion, whence it is that it gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only among women is it to be met with in a tolerable form. [1431] Like Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane of possibility, [1432] in the manner of the liberal theologians of the period; and like him he often writes as a deist, [1433] though professedly for a time a Kantist. On the other hand, he does not hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed no morality, no Natur-recht, [1434] and no political metaphysic) required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it. [1435]